If you’ve been waiting for Android tablets to catch up with Apple’s iPad, the wait might be over.

I wasn’t overly impressed with the first batch of Android tablets. They reminded me of the early Android smartphones like the HTC Dream – brimming with potential but not quite ready for the big time. After spending some time with the sleek new Acer Iconia Tab A500 running Android 3.0 “Honeycomb”, I feel it’s safe to say Android tablets have come of age.

For now Acer is selling the 16GB wifi-only A500 for $579 and the 32GB wifi-only for $678 – impressive pricing compared to the first-gen Android tablets. The A501 wifi/3G models should be available in June.

The 10.1-inch A500 is a thing of beauty and makes a striking first impression. It’s just as slender as the original iPad and is only a tad heavier at 765 gm compared to the iPad’s 680 gm. The A500’s tapered edges help emphasise the feeling of slenderness and the extra weight isn’t really noticeable at first. After a while I found myself resting the A500 on my lap more than I would with the iPad, so I guess you start to feel the weight after a while. That doesn’t bother me too much because I’d say the A500 is designed more for using on the couch than the train. If you’re looking for a smaller and lighter travel companion, keep in mind Acer will also offer a 7-inch A100 – unlike Apple’s one-size-fits-all approach to tablets. The A100 features a pretty meagre 8GB of storage, but the other specs are good and it will most likely be the cheapest entry-level Honeycomb tablet. The wifi-only A100 will be available in June and the 3G/wifi A101 will be available in July.

Getting back to the A500, it utilises an aluminium shell with your standard tablet design but hiding a few surprises. Holding it in portrait mode you’ve got the power button and headphone jack across the top right, with volume buttons and a rotate lock switch down the right side. Below this is a plastic cover which comes away to reveal the microSD card slot and a gap which will take a SIM in the 3G-capable models.

Across the top left you’ve got a micro-HDMI slot – the first indication that the A500 has a few impressive tricks up its sleeve. Halfway down the left side you’ll discover a docking port, which works with the optional charge cradle. Across the bottom edge you’ll find a USB2.0 slot (host), a micro-USB connector (slave). Finally you’ll find a 2 MP camera on the front of the A500, accompanied by 5 MP camera at the back with an LED flash. Also on the back are two speakers.

You wont find dedicated home, menu, back and search buttons for navigating the menus, as these are all onscreen buttons – which makes sense considering the tablet is designed to be used in both portrait and landscape mode.

Under the bonnet the A500 sports an NVIDIA Tegra 250 dual-core processor accompanied by 1GB of RAM – which helps Android sing. You’ll also find 16GB or 32GB of storage.

Fire up the A500 and you’re immediately struck by the bright, crisp screen. The tablet boasts a 1280×800 resolution with a 16:10 aspect ratio – so it’s slightly sharper than the iPad’s 1024×768 display. Of course you need to allow for the difference in screen size. It would seem the fairest way to do this is to calculate the pixel density in pixels per inch – which sees the A500 slightly sharper at 149 ppi compared to the iPad’s 132 ppi. Yet, as usual, comparing devices is more than a numbers game. If you want to apply these calculations to other tablets you’ll find the 7-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab comes in at 170 ppi.

From my testing the 1024×600 Samsung Galaxy Tab didn’t look as sharp as the iPad, but I suspect this is because Android 2.2 Froyo is only designed to support 854×480. Samsung tweaked the Android OS for the Galaxy Tab, but many of the applications still would have been running at 854×480. Of course at that resolution the pixel density would have still been on par with the iPad, but it clearly didn’t look as sharp. Like I said, it’s a reminder that comparing such devices isn’t just a numbers game.

Now that Android 3.0 supports higher resolutions we can expect impressive results from the Honeycomb devices. The Kindle app certainly looks crisper on the A500 than it looked on the Samsung Galaxy Tab. It was the Zinio magazine app which really made the Galaxy Tab look shabby next to the iPad, but unfortunately Zinio is limited to a few devices and isn’t available in Android market. I tried to get Zinio running on the A500 using this workaround but ran into a parsing error trying to install the final file. Overseas reports indicate the A500 comes with Zinio pre-installed and Acer locally tells me there’s been a delay but it will be pre-installed when the A500 goes on sale in Australia.

The A500 utilises an LCD TFT display with an 80-degree wide viewing angle, and can certainly hold its head high alongside the iPad. The A500’s LCD screen doesn’t suffer the blue tinge that you find on many of the AMOLED displays, in fact I’d say if anything the whites are a little whiter on the A500 than on the iPad 1 and perhaps on par with the iPad 2. The A500 does an impressive job of displaying the image of Peter Costello below, the stripes in his suit are clear and there’s plenty of detail in the shadows but the skin tones are still healthy. The A500 also has wider viewing angles, tilting the tablet loses the stripes in the suit on the iPad but not the A500. Once again, the A500 makes the Samsung Galaxy Tab look pretty shabby.
Get the A500 outside and I’d say the screen glare is a little worse than the iPad, but not much. The A500’s slightly whiter whites help compensate.

At this point I have to say Acer’s A500 is by far the best Android-based tablet I’ve seen to date and the only one that I’d consider a serious competitor to the iPad. It certainly sets the bar pretty high for its Android 3.0 competitors and gives me confidence that Android tablets can slug it out toe-to-toe with the iPad this year. On Wednesday I’ll take a closer look at some of the A500’s sweet new Honeycomb features.

Source: http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/computers/blogs/gadgets-on-the-go/hands-on-acer-iconia-a500-tablet-20110418-1dkaz.html